Absorbent articles such as diapers, training pants, adult incontinence devices, diaper holders, feminine hygiene garments, and the like are designed to absorb and retain liquid and other discharges from the human body and to prevent body and clothing soiling. Absorbent articles are also designed to provide fitment force to prevent absorbent articles from sagging or sliding down on the body of the wearer during wear. Such fitment force can be provided by utilizing stretchable material around the waist panel of absorbent article. Several attempts have been made to make portions of absorbent articles stretchable in response to relatively low wearing forces exerted upon the absorbent articles. Typically, prior art solutions rely on the addition of traditional elastics such as natural or synthetic rubber. For example, traditional elastics have been secured to a portion of the waist panel of the absorbent article, such as a portion of the topsheet or a portion of the backsheet forming the waist panel. However, the portions of the topsheet and the backsheet are not normally elastic or stretchable. One approach to provide extensibility to the inelastic material is to subject the elastics and material to mechanical processing, e.g., ring-rolling, to permanently elongate the material to extend beyond its initial untensioned length and allow elastics to be effective. However, mechanical processing sometimes causes unexpected holes which are randomly created in the material which gives poor impression to the consumers. Otherwise, highly processable materials, e.g., having high modulus against strain, which is expensive, must be used to avoid such unexpected randomly created holes.
Thus, there is a need to provide an absorbent article having extensibility at the waist panel which can be formed cheaply and which provides aesthetics to the consumers.